A Campfire tale

 Some things never change.  Clichés for one; ogres for another.  No matter how many stores he hiked through he couldn’t find a backpack that fit right. Now his back menaced him with a stab of pain between his shoulder blades with each step.  But it was a beautiful day and he could forgive little pains, and the egalitarian assumptions of stoned backpack designers.

 The trail had wearied his legs, but invigorated his spirit. The ogre sat on a granite boulder at the edge of the sky blue mountain tarn, drew a soiled burgundy kerchief from his belt and dabbed the sweat from his brow. He doffed his deep lugged hiking boots, tilting them one by one until bits of gravel rolled free, a libation for the gods of the earth and sky. He set his boots next to him, waved his feet, and wriggled his toes to loosen the sweaty socks.  His feet drying he lay one arm across a belly that refused to diminish, encouraged in its rotundity by late night snacks, and let the other stroke his wire haired pointer.  The ogre’s sigh of contentment sailed along the surface of the tarn and vanished in the cool mountain air.  He could relax for an hour or so before he built a fire and ate dinner.

      The sky was clear and he eagerly anticipated the night’s heavenly jewelry display.  He had money in the bank, a tan skinned Hummer, a Rolex on one wrist and a rolodex of blondes to wear on the other, but this was his real treasure. A sapphire sky turning amethyst as the sun set, and later a silver moonlit lake set in a band of granite beneath a diamond twinkling sky.  It had been too long since he’d done this. He’d promised his father he’d do it more, to keep his memory alive, to keep the old ways alive.

      Some things change. It was too bad the homesteaders had used all the trees around the lake, though there had been scant few to begin with, for he would dearly have loved to roast his meal with a spit. That was okay though.  The children would taste fine raw. He had preferred them that way since he was a kid.  One crack on the skull with a rock at the right angle, purse the lips just so and the brains leapt into your mouth, warm and squishy if fresh, snotty and slippery if allowed to cool.  That was the best part, like eating the inside of a marshmallow first. His mother hated that, said it was bad manners.  Ma and Pa homesteader could simmer at the edge of the fire pit for a while.

     He cracked open a keg of Coors. To get a taste of the Rockies. He took a sip, smiled and held the beer up with one hand, tilted it and nodded to his father’s memory, “To you dad.”